Elsa Nilsson's Band of Pulses: Pulses
ears&eyes Records

With Pulses, the versatile, Brooklyn-based jazz artist Elsa Nilsson shows herself to be as much visionary as flutist. It's not the first time she's done so, however, as earlier releases have also seen her boldly tackling new ideas and territory. On an album premiering her latest creative outfit Band of Pulses (Nilsson, pianist Santiago Leibson, bassist Marty Kenney, and drummer Rodrigo Recabarren), Nilsson turns her attention to Dr. Maya Angelou (1928-2014) and her poem “On the Pulse of Morning.”

After seeing a clip of the renowned poet reciting the text at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration, Nilsson was struck by the musical inflections of Angelou's delivery, the way her voice rose and fell in concert with the dramatic content and how the rhythms of her speaking evoked the tension-building flow of a jazz soloist. Nilsson naturally began thinking about how she might incorporate the speaker's words into a musical context and after obtaining permission from Angelou's estate to work with the January 20th, 1993 recording began developing the project. Whereas some moments arise where her flute replicates the voice pattern (the two opening verses, for instance), other passages use the speech rhythm as a springboard for elaboration by quartet. During “Bruising Darkness,” one even could be convinced that the musicians are, in fact, accompanying the poet live if one didn't know better.

Of course it wasn't just the musical aspects of the poet's voice that led Nilsson to choose the text, it was its content too. On that momentous January occasion, Angelou referenced American ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity that the country is still struggling to achieve. It's not a despairing text, however, as the poet ultimately champions hope, despite the crippling setbacks the country experiences year after year. Whereas one passage reads, “History, despite its wrenching pain / Cannot be unlived, but if faced / With courage, need not be lived again,” another states, “Lift up your hearts / Each new hour holds new chances / For a new beginning.” Consistent with Angelou's acknowledgment of life's beautiful and horrible aspects, the flutist does the same in music that veers from gentle to cataclysmic. Elements of blues, gospel, jazz, funk, and even chamber classical surface in the eight-part suite in a manner that reflects the breadth of human experience.

With Pulses, Nilsson continues her bold re-asserting of the flute's rightful place in contemporary jazz. As a soloist, she's an unfailingly inventive and commanding force, and the musicians she's recruited are intensely responsive partners, Leibson a compelling soloist in his own right and Kenney and Recabarren as creative and dynamic as the leader. Compositional structures are followed, yet the playing feels free and spontaneous. In a few places, Nilsson applies effects to the flute to give the music a spacey character and intensify its fury, but for the most part the playing's grounded in the acoustic jazz idiom. Adding to the variety of the presentation, different instrument configurations sometimes arise, with the flutist and bassist aggressively dueting in “Root,” to cite one case.

Pulses isn't the first time a musical artist has used speech recordings as a basis for composition—Steve Reich did so years ago in his string quartet-and-tape piece Different Trains and in the multimedia opera The Cave—but that doesn't significantly diminish the value of Nilsson's project. By sharing Angelou's poem with listeners, the flutist has re-affirmed the relevance of the poet's message and helped ensure the work won't be forgotten. How fitting that just as the poem ends with an uplifting “Good morning,” so too does the music rise with Nilsson quoting Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World.”

November 2023